In a city where demand for public housing has run well ahead of supply, and where much of the existing stock is sub-standard, the government's plan to build 1288 new public dwellings over the next five years is welcome news. Housing Minister Yvette Berry has indicated the new homes will be "salt and peppered" across the city, rather than being clustered in high-density properties – a practice that has in the past led to social problems.
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However, a significant number of Nicholls residents have taken umbrage at proposals for a 14-unit development in their suburb, a development which the government says is intended for elderly people and people with a disability. Advised in February of plans to site the units near the Gold Creek primary school, 200 residents wrote submissions to the government's public housing renewal's invitations – most of them critical.
Canberrans are more familiar with how government works and how grievance processes operate than just about anyone else in Australia, and the fact that so many Nicholls residents took the trouble to put their concerns in writing is unsurprising. As might be expected, many of the submissions' points were legitimate and well argued. Some people, for example, questioned the rationale of locating people in an area not well endowed with support facilities or public services, particularly the medical facilities of which older people tend to be regular users. Others queried the loss of land set aside for community use in an area already short of proper recreational facilities, and not a few residents suggested that the area's shops and services (which were "not in the price range for low income people to afford") would accentuate the disadvantaged circumstances of the future tenants.
A great many of the respondents, however, seemed motivated more by the likely detrimental impact of public housing on property values and amenity than by any particular anxiety about how the tenants might cope in strange and unfamiliar surrounds. Such concerns are hardly novel, or confined to Canberra. However, Nicholls is an upmarket Gungahlin suburb, and currently free of public housing, and the dog-in-the-manger attitude that imbues certain of the submissions suggests the complainants would like it kept that way.
It is unfortunate these people did not trouble themselves to better understand the goal of the government's housing renewal program – which is to ensure that tenants not continue to be ghettoised in enclaves of disadvantage and dysfunction but have the opportunity and advantage of mixing in a civilised and social environment. It is in the interests of all Canberrans to have social housing that works, and indeed most are happy (or at least unconcerned) that all but one or two of the territory's suburbs have a sprinkling of public housing. Nicholls residents will eventually get used to this idea of a vital community compact, too. But with a great many other public housing initiatives to be announced in coming months and years, the government needs to be more proactive to minimise misconceptions and scaremongering.
